Archive for July 16, 2008

The Substance Behind Barack Obama: His Law Degree

About half of the internet has been trying to sort out and properly react to Barack Obama’s alleged turn to center on FISA, the death penalty, and a few other issues.

The other half would’ve joined the party, but they were busy captioning pictures of cats.

I’ve resolved the issue to my personal satisfaction by reasoning that Obama’s “rightward turn” might be partly attributed to a heartfelt desire to reach across the aisle and be every person’s president, and partly chalked up to simple politics, both of which are fine by me.  But why listen to a law student when you could listen to a law professor?  Kyron Huigens of Cardozo Law reasons that Obama’s turn is not a turn at all, but rather explained by his principled beliefs in the way the law works.  I think he’s probably on the right path.

And this, my friends, is why you want an “elitist” as a president.  The Bush years have so blinded us by partisan gamesmanship that we’re looking for spin when there may not be any: “what’s that crazy Obama kid trying to prove?”  For once, we might just have a candidate who’s researched the issues, thought long and hard about them, and reached an intellectual conclusion.  He may not be as fun to sit down and have a beer with as George W. Bush, but when the tab comes, at least Barack Obama can calculate the tip.

Animal Rights, Evolution, and Morality: Who’s Afraid of the Slippery Slope?

The rhetorical trick known as the slippery slope argument – by which one person argues against another’s idea by theorizing that it leads inexorably to the end of the world – is the darling of creationists and conservative jurists alike. Like its rhetorical brother, the empty appeal to tradition, it’s a way of saying something when there’s nothing left to say: if you don’t have anything concrete left to say about the evils of gay marriage, you can always argue that it inexorably leads to marrying toasters.

Along those lines, we’ve most recently we’ve heard from none other than the Discovery Institute (friend of John McCain!) that evolution, working together with the animal rights movement, calls into question the brightline definition of “humanity,” causing us to devalue humanity, inexorably causing genocide, abortion, and euthanasia. Wrong. On multiple levels.

Not human, but pretty damn cute.

First, the argument assumes that when the definition of “human” becomes open to debate, that the legal protections afforded humans must equalize down to the level of animals, protecting less and less life. But, if evolution & animal rights work together to blur the line between species, they do not necessarily cause a race to the bottom. In fact, it can lead to a race to the top, and a recognition of the profound value of life in increasingly more and more organisms. We can always respond to the similarities between man and animal by raising animal rights up, perhaps not on par with our own, but at least partially, in recognition of our partial similarities.

The Discovery Institutes’ argument assumes that granting rights to animals – or, partially equalizing up – is simply not an option. That assumption betrays a shocking lack of respect and perspective. If we’re the only thing that matters – if the Discovery Institute won’t even entertain the idea that there’s any value beyond human life – we’re not only ignoring the Biblical injunction that mankind protect wildlife (let’s play on their court!), but we might as well also repeal anti-animal cruelty legislation. While there are huge problems with some animal rights regimes, to answer those problems by ignoring animals is simply evil.

Second, like all slippery slope arguments, the Discovery Institutes’ argument relies upon an assumption of a failure of will. The argument proceeds along these lines: if man and animal are legally and scientifically blurred, there is literally nothing stopping us from concluding that man is worthless. The slippery slope posits that no-one will stop, think, and reason out a principled way to avoid that philosophical conclusion. It poses a line-drawing question – where do we draw the line on what rights animals get? – and then refuses to answer the question. Like so much of creationist spin, indeed like intelligent design itself, the slippery slope argument poses a problem and then simply gives up on finding a solution.

We are in charge of our own legal, philosophical, and moral destinies. If a legal or philosophical position potentially leads us down a slippery slope of reasoning towards a dismal outcome, we have vested in ourselves the reason and the capacity to draw the line, and solve the problem. While “ideas have consequences,” no idea has bad consequences unless we let it, and at that point, our personal failures become complicit in, and superseding causes to, the evil inherent in the idea. Ideas don’t kill people; jerks who don’t think straight kill people.

The Evangelical Re-Invention of John McCain, and the Sad Paradox of Fundamentalist Family Values

Hucka-being John McCain

While our friend Progressive Conservative at “The Big Stick” wondered aloud today whether the maverick spirit of 2000′s John McCain lives on in 2008′s Candidate McCain, the man himself continued his sell-out to the fundamentalist wing of the Republican party by pulling out the Republican Party’s perennial election year distraction: the danger posed by The Gays. This time the issue was adoption: guess where McCain stands.

McCain’s defense of his opposition to gay adoption is right out of the “family values” theo-conservatives’ playbook – “we’ve proven that both parents are important in the success of a family so” – and it has always struck me as odd in the extreme. The appeal is essentially only to tradition, without any attempt to grapple with the real reason behind the issue: we’ve always done it this way, so we ought to continue. What is tradition, but a shield to hide behind when all other arguments fail? That we as a nation should turn away willing parents when children languish in orphanages, to the detriment of their futures, is an appalling disgrace. When a “pro-family” position requires one to sacrifice the best interests of the child at the altar of the Old Testament’s outdated Levitical morality, “family values” cease to be about the family, and become solely about the politics. The greatest ruse ever pulled on the American voter was to convince him that defending the family meant being an evangelical Christian, ergo a Bush/Huckabee Republican. In time, ridiculous contradictions like this one will give the lie to that old canard.

And it’s downhill from there. While one side of McCain’s mouth casts him as a practical, thoughtful, reasoned and progressive conservative like Teddy Roosevelt, the other pulls creationism into the public school classroom. “[Teaching evolution is] up to the school boards,” he has said on the issue. “That’s why we have local control over education.”

No. It isn’t. Local control over education is meant to allow schools to tailor their curriculum to subjective beliefs and standards, to allow them to teach local history, languages, and literature. Science is not a subjective belief. It is an objective methodology geared to uncovering the facts that knit the universe together, and as such it does not vary based on locale. Gravity works the same in Louisiana as it does in Manhattan, and it ought to be taught as such. McCain’s subtle endorsement of creationism is just the latest in a swing right on that issue. Take McCain’s recent keynote speech at the Discovery Institute. This is the man who reluctantly campaigned at Bob Jones University, now embracing his role as the avatar of theocratic religion.

McCain attempts to mask his endorsement of the religious right mainline by couching it in the rhetoric of “local control” – let the states/cities/towns decide issues like abortion, gay rights, and science. This is a thinly veiled attempt to pass the buck, and a tactic commonly used by McCain to exculpate himself from endorsing far-right positions by nominally devolving the issue to others who he knows will make the (religious-)right decisions. McCain won’t destroy women’s rights: his Supreme Court appointees will. McCain won’t endorse homophobic bigotry. But he will idly stand by while states do it. McCain won’t teach creationism. But he will subtly endorse it, and let others teach it if they want to. Make no mistake: McCain may interpose a middleman between him and some radically theocratic positions, but the result is the same. Invoking states’ rights on issues of federal constitutional law only absolves him of the responsibility for the decision, a cop-out I frankly didn’t expect from Senator John McCain, straight-talking maverick extraordinaire.

And that’s the real story. McCain is no longer his own man. We get our term “candidate” from the Roman rite by which the politician, prior to an election, donned a white robe to symbolize his purity of mind and devotion to justice. It may be true that no candidate ever has, then or now, maintained that purity in fact. As for McCain at least, his white robe has already been blackened by the dirty hands of a million special interests, not the least of whom sit happily in their megachurches and marvel at the speed and grace with which they turned the politician who once called them “agents of intolerance” so firmly into their man.

Futurama on Global Warming

Communicating complicated scientific issues to the public is becoming increasingly vital to democracy, especially as science becomes more complicated and more intrusive upon traditional values. With global warming becoming a valence issue, though, I think it’s time to pay credit where credit is due to those who so effectively educated the public on the myriad threats to our environment.

I refer, of course, to none other than Al Gore and the heroes behind Futurama.

Why did we not elect this man!?